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https://doi.org/10.15203/atem_2021_2.09

Le jour où le Poète reprit sa lyre. « Down by the Salley Gardens » ou la nostalgie des origines

Mar 9, 2021
ATeM Archiv für Textmusikforschung
Anne-Marie Gouiffès

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The Irish poet Yeats tells the story that as he was walking one day in the Ballisodare countryside, he heard a woman singing some remnants of a very old song that moved him. The poem that he then wrote is, he assures us: “an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself” (Yeats 1889, 90).Weaving together reverie and thought in “Down by the Salley Gardens”, this poem of Yeats that became, in its turn a song again, I have tried to approach this land where poetry and music are still reaching out for each other, animated by an ever present longing for a common root: that of a time where words and sounds were not yet divided.

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10.1007/978-1-349-06236-2_9

‘Modern Irish Poetry’ (1894; rev. 1899, c. 1903, 1908), repr. from A Book of Irish Verse Selected from Modern Writers, ed. W. B. Yeats (1895, rev. 1900)

Jan 1, 1988
William H O’Donnell

The Irish Celt is sociable, as may be known from his proverb, ‘It is better to be quarreling than to be lonely,’1 and the Irish poets of the nineteenth century have made songs abundantly when friends and rebels have been at hand to applaud. The Irish poets of the eighteenth century found both at a Limerick hostelry, above whose door was written a rhyming welcome in Gaelic to all passing poets, whether their pockets were full or empty. Its owner, himself a famous poet, entertained his fellows as long as his money lasted, and then took to minding the hens and chickens of an old peasant woman for a living, and ended his days in rags, but not, one imagines, without content. Among his friends and guests had been Red O’Sullivan, Gaelic O’Sullivan, blind O’Heffernan, and many another, and their songs had made the people, crushed by the disasters of the Boyne and Aughrim,2 remember their ancient greatness.